Military Wife Quote: The Hole In The World

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7 Oct 2012

American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay was once described as having “a mouth like a Valentine.” I’m more likely to fall into the “mouth like a sailor” category, but I understand her feeling exactly when she wrote this military wife quote,

“Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night.”

Why is it that daytimes during deployment are not that big of a problem? I can fill my days.

It is just the nights that yawn open. The minute the light starts to fade I am suddenly so aware of the part of my life that ought to belong to my husband.

We ought to be eating dinner together. We ought to be wrangling over whose turn it is to supervise homework. We ought to be peeling back the covers at the same time and listening to the house settle around us.

I wish that after years of military life that I would be more adept at handling that ‘hole in the world.’ I wish I were one of those people skateboarding up one side of that hole and down the other and doing it with a little flare.

Instead I am more like the poet, falling into that hole again—and missing my sailor like hell.